The Great Pacification

Suppose you grant every nostalgic memory about the wonder of the Fifties. Stipulate that America was packed with happy prosperous one-earner families, cozily protected by their unions and patriotic employers. There's still one wee problem to worry about: nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Now there was a genuine existential threat. And it's gone for good.

[T]he total number of conflicts--international and civil wars--being waged
around the world increased threefold during the Cold War years, then
sharply declined, with this latter change going largely unheralded,
even at the United Nations.

And:

The average war in the 1950s killed about 10,000 people a year; in the
new millennium the average was a little less than one thousand.

And it is not just battle deaths that have declined. Deaths from
conflict-exacerbated disease and malnutrition have also been reduced by
long-term improvements in public health, notably immunization, that
have caused child and adult mortality rates to decline sharply across
the developing world over the past 30 years. These improvements have
not only steadily reduced mortality rates in peacetime but also saved
countless lives in wartime.

In addition there have been major increases in the level, scope,
and effectiveness of humanitarian assistance to war-affected
populations in countries in conflict. These interventions have reduced
wartime death tolls still further.

During the Naughts, insular Americans could easily imagine that the world was descending into a new dark age of slaughter. But you need a magnifying glass to see it in the data. Availability bias strikes again.

I am not sure I understand the criteria here, but it doesn't seem to include the Rwandan genocide, which, if included, would be literally off the chart. I am skeptical that it is correctly counting other violent killings in Africa and Asia (Khmer Rouge, Darfur, Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, Soviet gulags...)

If this measurement isn't counting relatively lopsided genocides as war, then it's just using an outdated version of the term that doesn't accurately measure the amount of slaughter in the modern world.

My worry is that this is a lull, not a permanent decline. We all got a good hard shock from WWII and the development of nuclear weapons.

But because of that, we in the western powers have become so wimpy we can't even suppress measly little rebellions, even if they are significant threats. Think Egypt or Israel-Palestine, where a major power with all the technology advantage can't solve their problems. Mass-slaughter of civilians has gone out of fashion, and that's tremendously empowering for the low-tech mob.

I don't mean to endorse going back to the bad-old-days. Not at all, no way. Most of the wimpiness is good stuff, at least in the short term - it means not bombing kids, not firing on protesting students, not rounding up and executing the opposition.

But I don't think we've figured out the ramifications of the new rules. I worry that the first Hitler to come to power in a place like Russia or India or Pakistan is going to cause a lot of harm before society is able to deal with it. We'll make the 1930s look like a tough stand. Arguably, we would be lucky to survive such an occurrence. We're really lucky Putin is mostly harmless.

Whether this is a long term trend or a lull remains to be seen. Let us hope for the best.

But in my view, this counts as evidence for the virtues of cold war militarism. Pacifism a la Caplan would have enabled the Sovs and the PRC to attack more countries and probably delayed the great Pacification, just as pacifism would have ended in disaster in the 2nd world war.

It's an argument against silly measures of the narrow peacetime "costs" of militarism.

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